Posts made by Sammi

For the same reason that games have theme and system documentation. Yes, RP can happen without any of the above, but when players come into conflict with one another, then those conflicts can either be fought out or resolved according to the clauses that everyone has agreed to by playing on that game. When there's no conflict, it serves to put players on the same page, which allows for more streamlined cooperation (this is part of why not-for-profits have mission statements). When there is conflict, you have the "contract" to fall back on.

On top of what Roz says, I believe that a game's founders should be absolutely clear on what they expect of their game's culture, which is going to involve some imposition of subjective values on others. That way, players who don't like it can choose to patronize other games (unless there's no other game in that niche) and players who accept it are all on roughly the same page regarding conduct.

Basically every game has a consent policy, but I don't think that goes quite far enough. You also can't boil it down as far as vague platitudes like "Be excellent to each other." I also think that Halicron's list is much longer than necessary, but some people might want a document like that. There should be at least a couple of short paragraphs on what the vision is and how players are expected to behave, that everyone sees when they're new to the game.

If a game's runner agrees with everything that Halicron says and wants to mandate or heavily suggest that players conduct themselves in that fashion, it could well go on a game in an official capacity.

Noncommittal answers are definitely the best way. I've seen the same thing happen with someone who was still logging in to the game and could easily have been contacted, but had been very short on RP time lately so playing with people who were available when they were and getting important scenes done took precedence over "relationship maintenance".

It boils down to a philosophical disagreement between people who assume that nothing happens off-screen between characters unless they explicitly agree to it, and people who assume that coworkers and significant others usually see each other all the time regardless of whether their players are RPing much.

@mietze said:

I think people do tend to tune out BBoards though. i think it's an excellent thing for a wiki. Putting it on a board for some reason feels pompous to me be I can't put my finger on why. Or why I would feel that way on a board but not the wiki, where I'd enjoy reading it. Hmm.

Reading a long bboard post is not an issue. It fills up your window, but it fits. There are paragraphs and tabs, so it's all perfectly readable. Then there's a part 2. You open the next one, just as long, but as you do someone pages you. Four lines, that scoot the bbpost up and out of the relative comfort it was enjoying. You respond and scroll up to read the post. As you're reading, your screen flashes to tell you that there are new lines at the bottom. You start debating whether it would be less pleasant to continue reading without finding out what the message was, or to scroll up and down between your conversation and your reading. Each new line pushes the post further up the page. You finish the second post, and see that there's a third....

Plus, even if you do break it up into sections that the game can store, that much solid text is a huge pain to read in the MU* client window. You'll lose many readers with each page of information unless they have a reason to believe that it's important. Reading the text in a browser window is much less tedious.

Or Twilight.

@HelloRaptor said:

If you believe that life or death situations are equal simply by virtue of being life or death, and that all forms of oblivion are equal, and that if you're going to suffer any one of those forms what happens (to you, to others, etc) afterwards is meaningless, then no there's really no reply I can formulate that's going to mean anything to you.

What happens after will be meaningless to you, because you won't exist anymore. If you don't exist anymore, you don't have the opportunity to think about it. Beforehand, it's only meaningful if you have the opportunity to contemplate the existential horror of the possibilities (as I said previously). You haven't demonstrated that a changeling has the presence of mind before making the choice to contemplate the existential horror of remaining in Arcadia. You haven't demonstrated that because the text about what goes on during the Durance is not yet available to us, so you're making assumptions based on your interpretation of the first edition Durance process and not even having the decency to elaborate on your assumptions. You're just stating that I'm an idiot.

Again, if you actually believe all life or death situations are absolutely equal, I can see why it wouldn't make sense to you.

All life and death situations are equally binary. You don't get to compromise. You don't get options. You either continue existing or you cease to exist. If you have something important you need to do, like revenge, when you get out of Arcadia, sure, you might betray someone and become a Darkling and would never do that again...until you need to take revenge on someone and a personal tie gets in the way of your vendetta.

That said, what you quoted isn't really what I said, which was that just because you made a choice to initiate your escape from Arcadia doesn't mean you must continue making that choice.

Nowhere did I say anything of the sort. What I said was that your choice (and thus your Seeming) is based on your personality, so you have to live with it. We agree on this, so why the Hell are you arguing with me about it?

That's not the same thing as saying that seemings are optional. When something is optional there's nothing lost by not using it except for opportunity. For all we know it could be optional like an Order in Mage is 'optional'. Sure, you can choose not to be part of one, but you lose out on free High Speech, get no Rote abilities, etc. Hell, he might just mean a way to run a game without Seemings, but not that some people will have one and some won't.

No Seeming existed in the first edition. And yeah, it was a trade-off. You lost the shiny Seeming benefits, but also lost their baggage.

The A_Newfie person he's responding to even tries to claim Fairest are just locked into being leaders, period, with such nonsense like "Here it is lead or don't play fairest." and he says pretty much flat out exactly what I've said

He's an author of the book and you aren't, so for convincing people like @Mnemosyne and @Thenomain, his word carries more weight.

@HelloRaptor said:

@Sammi

How is that different from survival?

I can't even begin to formulate a response to this question in the context of a character's story without choking on my own laughter, so I'll just leave it at: lolwut

Formulate a response. You're stuck in Arcadia. You have a choice between giving in and staying there forever - oblivion of the self - and escaping to live your life. That's a pretty binary choice between metaphorical death, and life. It is a survival situation, pure and simple. You think the changeling in that situation is going to sit around to contemplate the existential horror of their body living on without free will? No, they're really not. It is no more or less extreme than any other life-or-death choice.

Who said anything about not having to live with it? You can't believe it didn't happen, but you can pretend it didn't. You can want to believe that whatever you did wasn't who you are.

That's not what you said earlier. You said that a character can make that choice even if the choice they made in Arcadia has no connection with their personality, because it's somehow more extreme than life-or-death. You implied that they wouldn't have to live with it if they didn't want to, because that was a one-off thing and they'd never do it again.

But people have complained as if your Seeming must define both who your character is and that you have to play it like that, and so far it's not true even if that's not really the norm.

People have probably complained about that for every splat in every game line since the first edition of Vampire: The Masquerade.

I went back to read the Fairest post, and its accompanying forum thread, again and I'm reminded that my bit about the tyrant thing before was based not on the Fairest writeup itself but later comments by the author clarifying that what someone said earlier in the thread about how the curse was specifically supposed to be unexpected harm (and thus a Fairest can totally send people deliberately into harm and injury, but only suffer the Clarity break when it's an outcome they didn't intend or account for).

Well that's hugely important.

For those of you who don't want to dig through 23 pages of thread, MachineIV addresses the curse and Fairest warlords here and here. He backs up my assumption that playing with breaking points is supposed to be a regular part of the game, offers reassuring words for @Thenomain indicating that Seemings are optional, and also has something to say about the Seeming writeups being less flexible than in the first edition.

All of this stuff is still really rough, which is only more reason for people to look at them as how they can do things, instead of how they feel they're being told they can't.

Exactly.

@HelloRaptor said:

And... so? You're unlikely to ever be in the same situation. Changelings taken by a Keeper aren't just fighting for survival, they're fighting to not be completely obliterated and overwritten by something Other.

How is that different from survival? Yes, "fate worse than death". In the moment, you're choosing between existing and not existing. It's a fairly binary choice in my mind, unless you have the leisure time to contemplate existential modes of being that are less attractive than oblivion (a changeling in Arcadia should not have that luxury).

Your Seeming represents who you were in a transformative, supernaturally charged moment that represents the most extreme of extremes. In most cases that is likely very reflective of who a person is, but people are not wholly defined by a single moment or even a single choice in their lives.

Wholly defined? Certainly not. But they should have to live with it. The Darkling should have to live with the knowledge that, when the shit hit the fan, she threw her potential ally into the shit-covered fan in order to make good her escape. She might have a strong ethical code that she lives by, but she knows that she's capable of betrayal if it looks like it's going to be her or somebody else.

This is in contrast with first edition Lost where you could be a highly social person who gets taken and made into a Darkling and feels cursed with the shadows through no fault of her own. In second edition, you make your own bed and then have to sleep in it.

Your Seeming is what it is because at a time when the very essence of your existence was being made malleable and shaped to the liking of something Other, you (the character, obviously) made a choice, took agency and acted. That choice, those actions, acted as a supernatural mold to finish you off and your Seeming is the shape you hold because of that choice.

Yes. We'll see if there's a theme-based explanation for why there are six archetypes. It seems like something they would have written into the lore, even though the actual reason is that they're keeping the splats of the previous iteration.

@HelloRaptor said:

I don't know that this is necessarily the case, really. I've yet to see anything that doesn't suggest you can't be a poor fit for your Seeming, only that your choices during your escape define your Seeming. Is there anything to restrict an Ogre from regretting replacing his heart with stone, or a Fairest who stood up to lead during her escape just wishing she wasn't giving off Champion vibes?

I did say that regret was an option, but I believe that the fact that you need to make the choice yourself, at a time when you don't have much in the way of free will, indicates that Seeming is supposed to reflect a part of the changeling's personality. They might despise that side of themselves, but it's there and it's what they do when the chips are down and they need to survive. An Ogre could regret replacing his heart, but unless he has a death wish, he would do it again if he were in the same situation. If something comes and threatens his survival, he's going to wall himself off from his natural weakness and he's going to fight.

@Mnemosyne said:

Okay, but my point is that if you want to play -- visually! -- a big hulking Ogre, or a terrible-beautiful Fairest, or a skulking Darkling, you now have to have a specific personality type. This was not the case before. If you can only cut out those 'patterns' if you're a specific type of person, it limits character choices. This just seems obvious to me.

Except that it's not obvious. Ogres don't corner the market on being big and hulking. Fairest aren't the only ones who can be beautiful and terrible. You can skulk without being a Darkling (as I said, a lot of my Darkling ideas are more Beast with these changes). You just want to translate everything that would have been in each Seeming in the first version to this one.

these very specific types of agency now define how your character looks.

Yes. That seems to be an important component of the theme, but we don't have all of the information yet.

@Trundlebot said:

And it looks a lot like they're reducing creative freedom and intensifying the trauma drama, which is the exact opposite of the way I was hoping the new edition would go.

Reducing creative freedom, maybe. We'll see how the Elemental and Wizened writeups look, and then how the published documentation turns out. Tentatively, yes, but if they are it's a mostly neutral change. You can still hypothetically make anything you want with the 300 kiths, and then your character's personality shepherds them into one of six categories.

As for trauma drama, I'll point out that each Seeming has a mechanic that allows them to regain a point of Clarity. That's something that first edition never had.

Edit: Since changelings determine their own Seeming, there's also less trauma drama of the "I'm cursed with a mien that doesn't fit me" kind. Kith has to have some connection to your personality, and Seeming is a result of your own actions (even if you come to regret them later).

@Trundlebot said:

Okay no one point out I'm dumb, I already remembered that now kiths work entirely differently so I guess you can be a fairest or darkling animal-person or whatever.

I was going to point that out, yes. The genteel housekeeping spider would probably be Wizened, or maybe Darkling.

So I guess that makes seeming just like... a vague outline of a character archetype? Leader, Rebel, Tough Guy etc.. Like TVTropes when it didn't suck or something.

Yes-ish. Seeming is an archetype based on the choice the character made that allowed them to escape Arcadia.

Hm. But then seeming still affects how that kith manifests so... like I guess it's not the idea of a slot for "character archetype" that I mind, it's just that that seems different than what seeming was about and the connection between the two feels both stifling and kinda arbitrary.

It's definitely different from what Seeming was about, and every relationship between things in a game system is arbitrary by definition. Maybe it feels more arbitrary than usual because you're so used to them having something to do with one another, and now they have no relationship.

@Mnemosyne said:

The Fairest weren't the Sidhe, that's sort of exactly my issue with this. This writeup is a writeup of the Sidhe.

The Fairest design space included most of the Sidhe design space. Almost every concept that fit into the Sidhe would have translated to the Fairest, and both Sidhe and Fairest shared a sense of callous superiority and divinely granted privilege.

But why? That's the exact opposite of the 1E Fairest. That's my quibble here.

Because a designer wanted to do something new when reworking the game. Vampire and Werewolf have both been substantially changed, and Demon bears no resemblance except for a name. Did you expect Changeling to be any different?

A lot of formerly Fairest concepts are going to fit into other Seemings. A lot of concepts from other Seemings are going to fit the Fairest. It's a brand new landscape to explore, and that's exciting. That's why I'm supportive of the changes, even the ones I'm not sure I like at first (a lot of my Darkling ideas are now Beasts, which could cause awkwardness for the Contracts I want; and I have no idea how Elemental is going to fit into this paradigm where you make a choice that defines yourself). It's new, it's interesting, and so far all of the GMC games have turned out pretty cool.

Yes, as I said, I'm specifically disappointed that my favorite 1E splat has been given a complete 180 into something else. I'm perfectly fine with the game being reworked. I think this specific reworking is dumb.

You're saying that Elrond and King Arthur didn't fit into the Fairest paradigm before? I think they did. I wouldn't call this a 180. It's more like a 20-degree shift.

That is really not what is suggested by the Kith document, at all. The Kith document basically has the Kith as a texture that's overlaid on top of a Seeming's physical archetype.

A better way to think of it: kith is the fabric, and the changeling's choice of Seeming cuts a pattern out of it. What you are in Arcadia is the raw material, and you forge yourself via your choice to escape (this falls in to one of six archetypes).

I'm sure there's no shortage of possibilities! But there are still fewer than there were in 1E, and to me that's a strange revision to make.

The major change is that you have to make the choice to escape (no randomly being let go) and that this choice defines you as much as the whims of your Keeper. So changelings who don't fit their Seeming are out. I don't see any limitations other than that.

@BetterJudgment All of those fall under "attempting to educate" except for the wealth-sharing measures, and making these people better-off without also educating them would probably just encourage more kids. Thus, education is the only truly effective way forward.

Unfortunately, there's nothing anybody can do to stop people from having kids aside from attempting to educate potential parents.

@Mnemosyne said:

I've talked with Theno about this and we're of one mind on it. My big issue is that those organizers, orators and commanders were Wizened in 1E

The natural leaders have always been clumped more towards the Fairest. The concept of charisma as a divine gift appears in multiple traditions, and the Divine Right of Kings bit has been important from the Sidhe through the nWoD Fairest. The new conception of the Fairest is focusing heavily on this leader trope.

Their cruelty, or at least propensity towards it, was their defining quality. Their coldness, their distance from human emotion

Then where did Elementals sit? No, the Fairest were fine with emotion. They were just prone to assuming that everybody else mattered less than they did.

whereas this writeup makes it so that they feel compassion and morality more keenly than other Changelings.

Another way of putting it: this writeup makes those changelings who feel compassion and ethics more keenly than others into the Fairest.

These 2E Fairest as written could be perfectly interesting characters, but they're the most enormous divergence from 1E so far and as they were my favorite 1E Seeming, I'm pretty disappointed. I'm hoping a second draft will present a broader spectrum of character options.

You're disappointed that the game is getting reworked and, in the process, is becoming something different from what the first edition was.

Generally speaking, I like the idea of uncoupling Seeming and Kith but I hate the highly restrictive way the new Seemings have thus far been written. If they were just designations that'd be fine, but it's implied they still affect your physical appearance the way they did in 1E

Affect, not determine. A character's appearance is still going to be influenced more by their kith than their seeming. You could play a gorgeous, haughty Ogre.

so at the moment it really limits character concepts.

Every splat limits character concepts. It's part of the point of having a game with rules and theme in the first place, instead of a free-for-all. Like @HelloRaptor, I've been milling potential concepts with the released Seemings and have found no shortage of possibilities.

@HelloRaptor said:

@Surreality & @Thenomain

So no expendable henchmen as a Fairest. I agree that that's a bit odd, especially since the curse is about regretting failure and sometimes plans might succeed because underlings get hurt.

I wrote that bit.

You can absolutely have expendable henchmen as a Fairest. Fairest have problems with unintended harm. You can still be a fucking tyrant as a Fairest, you can still throw underlings at a problem with the expectation that they'll suffer even grievous harm in the process, if it's necessary to succeed.

This is where I side with Thenomain, in that the writeup doesn't say that to me. The writeup says, "if your people get hurt, you failed them". This is reinforced by the name of the curse: "Weight of the Righteous". The control freak example works mechanically, but thematically? It looks like Fairest are going to heavily involve the concept of ethical leadership. They are often the rulers, but they are also servants. Heavy lies the head that wears the crown. With great power comes great responsibility.

Where I disagree with Theno is that he thinks that isn't nuanced. I think that's hella nuanced. It cuts out some of the "pretty folk" and focuses more on the organizers, the orators, and the commanders.

@Misadventure If so, hold on to your socks. Don't click if you're afraid of spoilers, though. It's a little spoilery.

I find it awkward that you can't go directly to the oldest unread post in a thread. Some threads, like Fallcoast, can pick up two pages in a day.

@Thenomain said:

And this is where I roll my eyes and sigh. With the decision now out of my hands once I choose a Seeming, it limits exactly the kinds of things I like to RP.

Your Seeming is supposed to be a representation of your character's personality. If you make morally grey choices, you're a Darkling. If you hide your weakness, you're an Ogre. If you lead by example, you might be Fairest.

Disregarding the extent that every splat ever serves to limit RP in some fashion (they all do, by design), I don't believe that Seemings limit RP any more than "having a consistent personality" limits RP. What's limited is the fact that your character has to wear part of their personality on their skin.

What if I escape Arcadia by being an unfair-hearted leader, not by defying cultural taboos etc etc.? Someone who had to Get Shit Done, and Shit Got Done, and because of me we made it out alive.

That would fit both Darkling and Ogre very well.

@Thenomain said:

If you want to be a Fairest, you're going to be hurt if you don't treat your charges like precious little ducklings.

If you're Major Winters, you know that your men are in a dangerous situation. You put them there, and you're responsible for getting them out safely. Any failure reflects badly on you. If you're Henry V, it's expected that many of your soldiers will die, but every one of them will weigh on your conscience. You are the fearless leader and you carry the burden of the wellbeing of those who follow you because they willingly put their lives in your hands. This is not a requirement for coddling, this is ethical leadership in a combat situation.

@Thenomain said:

In nChangeling, you could be a killer flower, but what you did with that was up to you.

Still true, except that part of "what you do with that" is incorporated into your changeling nature as a Seeming.

Now, if your agency is a fair-hearted leader, you have to be a Fairest. If your agency is bully, you have to be an Ogre. You might disagree, but if you read the OP threads on these you'll find out that I'm not alone in reading it this way.

How much does escape agency define a character? If I want to make a fair-hearted leader, he's probably Fairest, unless he escapes Arcadia by defying a cultural taboo, ripping out his weakness, or making a dark choice to save himself. If you escape Arcadia by going savage, you're a Beast, but you still might have a "might makes right" attitude and push around weaker people. If you escape by backstabbing someone, you might try extra-hard to be good to your crew even though you can never really trust any of them. They shouldn't trust you, but for some reason they do and you don't want to let them down (even if you're convinced that you will eventually).

Or present it the other way around. If you want to be an Ogre you must be secretly sensitive.

Ogres aren't any more sensitive than anybody else. The curse is that they try to hide their sensitivity and risk Clarity if they can't maintain the façade. You know, like a lot of guys.

If you want to be a Fairest, you have to be super-concerned about those you order around.

So no expendable henchmen as a Fairest. I agree that that's a bit odd, especially since the curse is about regretting failure and sometimes plans might succeed because underlings get hurt.